


The Charm of the Highway Strip

by LaSordide



Series: Lonely Highway [1]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: First Time, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-27
Updated: 2012-09-27
Packaged: 2017-11-15 01:41:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/521764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaSordide/pseuds/LaSordide
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a car accident, and later there's a kiss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Charm of the Highway Strip

**Author's Note:**

> Here, I wrote something. It's the first thing I've ever written. I'm new here.
> 
> Did I mention this was the first thing I'd ever written? I'm probably doing this wrong. I am very, very sorry.

 

It’s funny, the things you can get used to.

 

 

1.

The job’s over, a simple corporate extraction that took place in a Valley suburb, and now they’re flying North along I-5 in the dead of night. Towards San Francisco, maybe. For a little r & r.

Neither of them had anything on tap after this LA job, so where they get to is their business.

The freeway between Bakersfield and Los Banos is fucking deserted this time of night. Pitch black, nothing but farmland on the east side and mountains on the west. Arthur can’t remember the last time he saw another car.

He peeks at Eames asleep in the seat next to him, his head mashed up against the passenger side window, seatbelt digging into his neck, and decides he’s far enough under to turn on the radio. Arthur finds the one station on this time of night that’s neither right wing talk radio nor Christian evangelism and settles into his seat. It’s jazz, the tobacco-smooth voice of Sarah Vaughn singing about the blues over a cup of black coffee wafting through the car.

And then there’s lights. Lights where there shouldn’t be.

 

 

Later, when Arthur thinks back on it, he imagines he feels the accident before he comes upon it. Before he sees the brake lights of the old Ford pickup in the ditch, canted the wrong way, diagonal to the road, the glow from the headlamps catching motes of dust and furious insects.

“Fuck,” he bites out. “Eames. Eames. Wake up.” Arthur slows the car down, pulls over to the shoulder about a hundred feet before the truck and stops, terrified he’ll run some poor soul over if he gets any closer. He puts his hand on Eames’ shoulder and nudges him, never taking his eyes off the wreck.

“Huh?” Eames startles awake. “We there already?”

“There’s an accident. Look,” Arthur nods ahead of them. He turns the radio off.

Eames comes to full wakefulness then and stares ahead of them and says quietly, “Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, Arthur. That does not look good.”

“I know. I know. I’m calling 911. We need to – we need to check the truck.”

They get out of the car and walk over to the pickup that’s upside down and facing the wrong way on the freeway and leaning precariously towards the driver’s side. The top of the cab is crumpled like an accordion. And while they’re both hardened criminals who’ve killed people – actual people, outside of dreams – neither of them feels prepared for this.

Eames watches Arthur’s head come back up on the passenger side of the truck, distantly hears him talking on the phone to the 911 dispatcher. There’s no one in the cab of the truck, a fact that has Eames thanking God for small mercies for a split second until he realizes what that actually means. And then he starts looking around the ditch for the bodies.

Everything’s suddenly hyper real and completely muted at the same time. He finds a man about twenty feet from where he’s standing. Jeans, plaid shirt with button snaps, one cowboy boot still on. Neck broken. There’s a woman in a floral cotton dress and a cardigan not far from him, face down in the dry, weedy turf. Her long black hair is still in a braid and her arms don’t look right.

Eames can feel his heart sink, his shoulders sag in resignation. So sad. Nothing to do but sit with the dead till help arrives, he supposes.

And then he hears crying.

2.

The baby seat, being smaller and lighter and more aerodynamic than an adult human body, must have been thrown farther than any of the other occupants. It’s far beyond the scope of the pickup’s headlamps, at any rate – Eames estimates a good two hundred feet and down an embankment from the scene of the accident.

He makes his way into the slope of the ditch towards the sound and then thinks he can make out something vaguely chair-shaped and pink in the darkness. He picks the car seat up gingerly and with respect, miracle of human engineering that it is, and brings it and the howling baby closer to the headlamps of the truck to get a look at it. He sets the seat down in the truck’s hazy glow and unstraps the child, picks it up.

If she hadn’t started crying, Jesus Christ – if she hadn’t started crying, he wouldn’t have even noticed her. He doesn’t want to think about what then. They’re in _California_ , for Christ sake. There are bloody _coyotes_.

He looks the child over. She’s completely unscathed, probably an extremely full diaper after what she’s been through tonight, but – unharmed. And Eames starts to laugh a little hysterically at that fact.

He strips his suit jacket off, wraps it around the child and cradles her, whispering to her gently and stroking the black tuft of hair at the top of her little head, drying the tears streaking her dirty face. From what little Eames knows about babies, he thinks this one is maybe four, five months old, max.

Paradoxically, perhaps, the baby’s cries start to ramp up now that she’s in a safer environment, wrapped in Eames’ arms. He looks down at the child’s contorted, screaming face, and notices she has tiny gold studs in her little ears, and _fuck_. Fuck, out of all this, that’s what almost breaks him. It occurs to him there’s probably more he could be doing to bring her comfort.

He loosens his tie, unbuttons his dress shirt to his navel, pushes his singlet to the side, and puts the child to his breast, almost as an afterthought.

3.

“Ambulance is on it’s way, but it’ll probably be a while. Nearest hospital’s back in Bakersfield,” Arthur is saying as he makes his way over to wear Eames is sitting in the ditch, his back to the wreck. “There’s nothing we can do but wait, may as well do that in the-“ he stops dead short, looking down at Eames in utter shock.

Eames who is sitting half naked on the side of a California freeway next to a fatal traffic accident in the middle of the night, apparently nursing a surprise infant, one large, muscular, tattooed, hairy tit slung into the child’s hungry mouth.

“Eames, what the fuck?” is all Arthur can manage. He jams his mobile phone into his pocket and starts feeling around for his totem, then gives up. He knows he’s not dreaming. It’s just his actual reality is fucked up beyond measure.

Eames gives him the side eye and Arthur feels – he feels caught out, like he’s been staring at a woman nursing her child in public. He shakes himself (this is _Eames_ , for the love of Saint _Fuck_ ) and squats down next to the other man.

 _Breathe, Leventhal. Just breathe, okay_? He says to himself.

He watches Eames nurse, big arms around the baby, all his attention focused on their connection at his (hairy, tattooed, _extremely fucking masculine, my God, you couldn’t mistake that_ ) chest. Eames free hand comes up to hold the baby’s and Arthur watches as she breathes a huge sigh of relief and closes her eyes, strong sucks at Eames’ body never abating.

They sit there in silence, Eames watching the baby, Arthur watching Eames, until they hear the sirens of the ambulance and police cars in the distance.

The baby is asleep when Eames hands her over to the paramedics.

4.

It takes about an hour with to wrap up with the cops, which is more then fucking fine with Arthur. Last thing he really wants to do right now is face Eames in the privacy of the rental car, to be honest. They watch the medics pack the bodies of the man and woman in two different ambulances after the first had taken the baby away. They leave their (wholly fake) information with the Bakersfield PD.

Dawn is starting to pink out the sky as they get back in the Toyota. There’s an extremely uncomfortable silence for about the first ten minutes of the drive, and then-

“You’re freaking out,” Eames says point blank, glowering from the passenger seat.  
  
“I’m not freaking out.” Arthur keeps his eyes on the goddamn road.  
  
“I can feel you freaking out from over here. I can practically _feel_ your knickers twisting,” he retorts. Eames is staring angrily at the side of Arthur’s face as he guides the Camry north along I-5. Arthur can see him adjust his tie under the seatbelt, a kind of tell Eames displays when he’s nervous.  
  
It hadn’t occurred to Arthur until right now that Eames might be nervous. About what Arthur’s thinking. Huh.

They pass a tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town called Kettleman City.

“I’m not freaking out,” Arthur repeats as gently as he can. He really is freaking out, but. “I just – I’ve never seen that side of you, I guess. I’m surprised?” He shrugs. Eames is still watching him like a hawk. “And, I mean the act itself was, uh – _unexpected_.”

That finally garners a huff of a laugh from Eames, breaking a bit of the tension in the car. They fall into silence for a bit again, and then Arthur asks, “Are you? A parent, I mean? Do you have kids, Eames?” Because he doesn’t know, and because it seems like something he should know, now.

“No,” Eames says. “No kids.”

“But you’ve forged a nursing woman before, or…?”

“Nursing women, pregnant women, sure.”

Arthur nods. He never got very far with forging. Tried his hand at it at the beginning of his dreamshare career, yes, but – he wasn’t good at it. Arthur doesn’t tend to stick around for things he’s not particularly good at, so. He’s not even sure he tried just being female in the past, let alone the full gamut of the things Eames has got to have experienced in the near decade he’s been forging.

Arthur realizes that deserves a hell of a lot of respect.

“Look,” Eames says, “when you forge – when you forge, sometimes you can’t help but remember bits and pieces of who you were when you were under, yeah? Sometimes you take those bits and pieces back to the surface with you.”

Arthur realizes he’s trying to explain what he witnessed at the scene of the wreck.  

“What I’m saying is, I did it because it was, well – natural to me. Because it was something I’d remembered doing in the past,” Eames shrugs. “There are a lot of things that are second nature to forgers that are not, perhaps, so normal to point men, I suppose.”

Arthur nods, looks at the digital clock on the Camry’s dash. It’s 6:15 AM. They’ve only been driving since around 1:30, but it feels like forever. Arthur needs some fucking coffee.

He finds a truck stop about a half hour later, gasses the car up and then pulls into a parking space between two semis. He and Eames both look like shit as they fumble around the gas station bodega, filling up 36 oz. coffee mugs and paper bags with Long Johns and crullers, not talking to each other.

Every time Arthur looks at the man now, all he can see is last night. The initial freakiness of the situation is gone at this point, and all Arthur can feel is the look of _tenderness_ that was on Eames’ face as he held the baby to his body. That’s proving hard for Arthur to shake off, for some reason. Because he didn’t know that was there, he guesses.

They pay for the stuff and Arthur brings it back to the car while Eames goes into the men’s room. Waiting on the hood of the car, sandwiched between the semis, Arthur makes a decision. He watches Eames come out of the toilets shaking his wet hands off, muttering to himself about how there’s _never any bloody paper towels in these bloody things_ , and blocks his path before he gets into the driver’s seat to take his turn at the wheel.  
  
“What?” Eames barks, tired and irritated.

Arthur hesitates for just a second because – wow, if he doesn’t pull this off, this is going to have been a truly, spectacularly awkward past couple of hours. He moves closer to Eames, strokes the man’s stubbly cheek with the pad of his thumb and places a tentative kiss on his mouth. When Eames closes his eyes, Arthur moves in for another kiss. And another. And another.

“What was that for?” Eames whispers when they break apart.

“Maybe the past few hours showed me a thing or two I didn’t know about you,” Arthur shrugs and gives him a reassuring, dimpled smile. He can see Eames is still off his game around him. “Things I realized I really, really like.”  
  
“Arthur… are you telling me you have some kind of nursing kink?” Eames narrows his eyes at him and Arthur laughs.

“Tom, _God_. No. No nursing kink. Jesus. Maybe – maybe a kindness kink, though?”  
  
Eames moves his hands down to the cradle of Arthur’s slim hips, strokes them over his trousers and plants a kiss on his forehead.

“Kindness, huh?” Eames says. “Do you want to know what I think?”

“I do. I really do. Fire away, Mr. Eames.”  
  
“I think we should take the next few days together. A little vacation somewhere, hmmm? And find out – find out more of what we’re capable of. All right?”

Arthur concurs.

5.

He wakes up to the sound of the crashing surf outside their Carmel hotel room the following morning. Sun is filtering through the tangle of dark green cypress trees that are growing right against the balcony. It’s fucking beautiful, but what Arthur really can’t tear his eyes away from is sleeping next to him.

Eames is on his side, facing Arthur, and Arthur takes a moment to simply look at him – all muscles and golden skin and hair and tattoos. He likes the slight paunch Eames has developed in the past year or so, how it softens his otherwise imposing form a little. It’s startling to Arthur that the reason he likes it so much is that he feels like Eames’ body has started to match what he knows of his personality.

Eames is surprisingly sweet when you get to know him. Protective. Caring. Giving.

 _Oh, he’s a giver, all right_ , Arthur laughs to himself, thinking about last night in this very room. He pushes at Eames until he rolls over onto his other side, broad back to Arthur.

And Arthur spoons him. He spoons Eames within an inch of his life. He spoons him _mercilessly_. Because this is definitely something he could get used to.


End file.
